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Date your gear

Enter a serial number or date code and we read it against the maker’s own scheme to tell you the year it was built. Every result carries its confidence, and where a serial cannot give a year, we say so rather than guess.

Only on doirado

We don’t just date your guitar. For the major brands we check the serial against the millions of listings we track and show whether that exact instrument has been advertised before, where, and at what price.

Guitars & basses81 brands
Fender, Gibson, Martin and dozens more, dated from the serial. For the major brands we also show whether that serial has been advertised before.
Pianos62 makers
Steinway, Yamaha, Kawai, Bechstein and many more, from the production serial.
Amplifiers10 brands
Fender, Marshall, Ampeg, Peavey and more, from the tube-chart or serial code.
Synths & pedals6 brands
Roland and Boss (the month code) and early Korg, from the serial.
Drums3 brands
Ludwig's badge serials and Yamaha's letter cipher, plus Premier's stamp.
Microphones2 brands
Shure's element date code and Electro-Voice's date stamp.
Pot, speaker & transformer codesEIA reader
The EIA date code inside an instrument or amp: the fallback when a serial cannot date it.

How the dating works

A serial number is not random. Each maker records the build date in its own way, and those schemes are published: a running production count for a piano, a letter for the decade on a Fender, a date code on the tube chart of an amp, a cipher on a Yamaha drum. We read the number the same way the factory wrote it, and cite where each scheme comes from.

Not everything can be dated from a serial. Some makers never numbered their instruments in sequence, and some kept the records to themselves. Where that is true we say so, and point to what does date the instrument instead: an interior stamp, the maker’s own lookup, or the date codes on the parts inside.

More on the method, the confidence levels, the known limits and what happens to a serial you enter is on the how it works page.